MauledAgain

Throughout my life I have known and spoken with many teachers. I have had discussions with those who taught me, friends and relatives who are or have been teachers, former students who are or have been teachers, and colleagues, neighbors, and others who are or have been teacehers. The are people who taught not only law school and undergraduate classes, but also K through 12 classes. When I heard their stories, I realized I was lucky. I was spared most of the challenges they faced.

I was forutunate that in all of my teaching situations, almost all of the students I encountered wanted to learn. Few were being educated against their will. Almost all of them were capable of learning what they were studying, though some did so easily and some needed to make much more of an effort. More than a few grumbled, but many of those students, months or years later, took the time to explain that they finally understood what was required of them to learn. These are some of the joys of teaching, helping those who want to learn accomplish what they set out to do.

But there are sorrows in teaching. In my formal and informal teaching roles over the years, I rarely encountered someone who did not want to learn. But most of the teachers I have known, particularly those in the K-12 schools, have not had the comfort of trying to educate people who want to learn. They must deal with those who don't want to learn because they'd rather spend their time playing or doing things that get them into trouble. Whether they are that way because they are being wilful or because they are dealing with emotional or other issues doesn't remove the challenge, though it can affect how the challenge is met. Many of these teachers also encounter students who lack the requisite abilities, often because they are misplaced in terms of grade level or curriculum, either through school system flaws or, worse, parental denials of reality.

The impetus for this post is the culmination of what I have read and observed over the past 15 years. It seems to me that a disppointing number of people do not want to learn. Many of those people have the capability to learn but choose not to make the effort. Some lack the desire to think for themselves, and many lack the ability to think for themselves. Perhaps some never had the opportunity to learn to think for themselves, having been through a limited education process of receiving and regurgitating words and paragraphs. Others had that opportunity but chose to let it slide by, choosing instead to cut class, ignore homework, cheat, and use parental influence to obtain approvals of which they were not deserving.

Why does this matter? It matters because the inablity to think for one's self causes a person to be more susceptible to misinformation, lies, scams, the wiles of con artists, and the propaganda of domestic and foreign adversaries. Those who pay attention to what is now happening and who have and use the ability to think for themselves surely can see the consequences of failing to think for one's self, failing to distinguish between fact and opinion, and failing to analyze allegations and information.

The ability and willingness to learn is what has fueled the evolution of the species. It is what generates progress, a word that meets antipathy when expressed as its adjective. Its absence generates the opposite, the adjective formed from the verb regress. And that is what is going to happen if society fails to persuade itself that education matters, that the ability to engage in analysis is important, and that the ability to think for one's self is essential.

I don't regret having been a teacher for a long time. I do not regret having spent a good part of my life engaged in education. I do regret that what I and others have been doing will turn out to have been insufficient to prevent society from backsliding into what some of us thought had been put behind us.